Document Imaging Blog

Extending SharePoint to Support Document Workflows

Next Tuesday, June 24th, Microsoft and eCopy executives will present a Webinar on how to generate more value from Microsoft SharePoint environments by adding third-party document workflow applications that support an organization’s existing business processes.

The featured speaker at the Webinar is John Graham, Microsoft senior product manager, who will discuss the role of SharePoint in enabling electronic document workflows that connect people, information and processes. He will also discuss the types of applications that organizations should consider integrating with Microsoft SharePoint, with a focus on document imaging software.

Among other topics, the webinar will provide information to help organizations:
- Extend SharePoint investments by supporting specific business workflows with third-party applications.
- Choose third-party applications that integrate with Microsoft applications.
- Seamlessly integrate paper-based information into SharePoint with a document imaging solution to move towards a paperless office environment.
- Increase the ROI of line of business applications by utilizing document scanning software that easily converts paper documents into searchable, electronic files.   

The Webinar takes place on June 24, 2008 starting at 2:00 p.m. EDT, and interested parties can sign-up in advance by accessing the event registration site. It features a live Q&A session for the participants to present questions to the expert speakers.

Distributed Capture Platforms

Frost & Sullivan has released a new white paper: “Distributed Capture Platforms: Reducing Costs, Removing Bottlenecks and Mitigating Risk”. It provides a great overview of distributed capture, the opportunities that it presents across multiple industries and challenges that may face. In full disclosure, eCopy co-sponsored this report with EMC. Download the report here.

A particular phrase within the report struck a chord with me.

“Regardless of why a distributed workforce exists, the use of distributed capture technology can help ensure employees in decentralized settings are successful.”

A distributed workforce no longer just the realm of the sales team and a few specified industries like retail and banking. The fact is -- when considering how to capture paper – if that paper has to be moved from its point of origin than a distributed workforce exists and there is an opportunity for distributed capture.

If you are heading to EMC World in a couple of weeks, be sure to stop by the eCopy booth (#323), the EMC booth (#425) or the Burntsand booth (#413) to chat about distributed capture and how the three companies can combine to deliver a powerful distributed capture solution.

AIIM Webinar Q&A – Part 4

Time to answer the last question posed during the April 9th AIIM webinar, Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Organizations. If you missed the webinar, a recording is available on our Website.  And please post a comment to this blog post if you have further questions that you would like me to answer. I’m happy to keep this Q&A going as long as the questions come in!

Our final question is around document services and came in from an IT executive at a professional services company. He asks:

Does eCopy have the ability, when dealing with a common document format to, while scanning the doc, pull data in certain areas for OCR, then using that data for naming, routing, or storing metadata in a database?

Yes and no. eCopy ShareScan comes bundled with an OCR engine for full text indexing and search purposes. For example, a document can be OCRd during the scanning process to create a searchable PDF for improved search and retrieval from databases or back end application. Our product does not automatically extract portions of data (i.e. zonal OCR) for purposes of indexing and routing. However, eCopy ShareScan is an open development environment with a published API and document services interface. Through this services interface, capabilities such as metadata extraction, barcode recognition, and image compression and cleanup can be easily added. For example, one of eCopy’s partners, I.R.I.S., has used the SDK to offer a set of document services for ShareScan.

Thanks again for all the great questions around document imaging & Microsoft. And please, if you have any other questions, please post them as a comment to the blog.

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management

AIIM Webinar Q&A – Part 3

In part 3 of our Q&A follow-up to last week’s AIIM Webinar (see part 1 and part 2), I’m going to answer a couple of questions around getting paper documents into Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint, not surprisingly, is top of mind with Microsoft-driven organizations who are implementing the technology in droves to enable better collaboration and document workflows. And one of the big challenges that these organizations face is how to ensure that knowledge workers are able to include information that resides on paper inside SharePoint.

Our first question asks: How does eCopy know where to send documents and metadata content to SharePoint?

Our integration with SharePoint is done through our Connector to eCopy ShareScan. Our SharePoint connectivity is predicated upon authenticated user access, i.e. the username/password assigned to users who access SharePoint. With this information, users are logged into their SharePoint repository at the MFP and can self-determine where to deposit information by browsing to the site, subsite, document library, etc. at the MFP. Alternatively, eCopy’s SharePoint connectivity can be pre-configured for a dedicated capture operation, for example, scanning resumes to a dedicated folder accessible by Human Resources. In this configuration, there is no user interaction with SharePoint, but the application intelligently knows where to store the document and what indexing information should be included with it, i.e. username, date, document type, etc.

The second question asks: What are the benefits of eCopy with MOSS 2007. And is eCopy a good connector for MOSS 2007?

The answer to the second part is yes, of course.  We recently upgraded our connector to support many of the features that were added to SharePoint in MOSS 2007, including support for multiple content types and workflows.

As for the benefits, I’ll list three of the biggest. 1) Our SharePoint Connector replicates the user’s desktop experience with SharePoint at the MFP, allowing navigation through sites, subsites, document libraries, etc. This leads to high user adoption and a reduction in errors because the workflow process is unchanged.  2) The Connector features dynamic connectivity to a live environment, meaning that a user is working with a live environment vs. a static image of the application. So in that environment, if new folders or other destinations are added to the SharePoint environment, these are automatically available to the user during the capture process.  3) From an IT perspective, our SharePoint connectivity requires no changes to the SharePoint environment and there are no modifications or additions necessary to the MOSS server.

We’ll be back next week with the final questions from last week’s webinar (view a recording here).

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management

AIIM Webinar Q&A -- Part 2

I’m back again with more Q&A from last week’s AIIM Webinar, Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Environments”. In part one of this series; I covered questions primarily dealing with the process for ensuring proper indexing of documents in a distributed environment. Today, I’m going to address a couple of questions around the topic of MFPs, or multifunction peripherals.

The first question is around the operating environments of MFPs:

How soon do you foresee having a large number of Web services enabled MFPs in the market?

Well, today approximately 9 million (laser) MFPs are put into the market each year and a growing number of those will have a Web services operating environment. A few vendors, such as Xerox, Sharp and Toshiba, are shipping devices with these environments today. But even with that being the case, the main challenges for the ISV community remains that while each of these are Web services based, they still remain different -- and proprietary -- development environments.  The ideal for the ISV community would be a single, “standard” Web services based development environment. Unfortunately, that is not the development landscape available from the MFP vendors today.  What is available are document imaging platforms like eCopy’s, which works on all of the major MFP and scanner brands and provides a single development environment (SDK) from which ISVs and end users can connect to a variety of MFPs.

Today’s second question is about whether MFPs are appropriate for processing back files, and asks, “this can’t really be done on an MFP?”

Agreed, that is not what MFPs are designed to do.  MFPs are great capture environments for low-volume document scanning by office workers.  Back file scanning is task that is best suited for high-speed, high volume scan operations with a dedicated scanning professional. One thing to think about however, is if “one-off” documents enter the organization that would need to be added to an archive. In those cases, the ability to have an office worker scan that document to the archive at a later date using an MFP can be beneficial. So, it is not so much that it can not be done on an MFP, but there are certainly processes that are better suited for other scanning processes.

I’ll be back later this week with some questions around scanning documents into SharePoint.

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management

Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Organizations – Webinar Q&A

I co-presented a Webinar on document imaging for Microsoft-driven organizations with Forrester Research last Wednesday afternoon.  A terrific audience of nearly 400 attendees posed a number of questions at the end of the Webinar and I will be posting those questions and answers on the blog this week. If you missed the Webinar last week, you can download a recording here.

The first question I will cover came in from an end user who works for a Credit Union. He asked:

In a distributed capture model, who captures the metadata/index information? How do you best control consistency and accuracy? And, how do you control user/site license costs?

While I hate to start off this week-long Q&A like this, the answer is it depends. A good distributed capture application should be flexible enough to automatically capture metadata information  based on items such as username, date, time, etc., AND present a Windows-like user interface that prompts the user for metadata information. In terms of control and accuracy, this can be addressed by the application designer/administrator through the use of tools such as list boxes, character limitation, mandatory indexing, and other selection fields. In the case of eCopy ShareScan, user selections would be pulled live from the backend application – for example with SharePoint, indexing fields are displayed with options such as content or document type to reflect the same metadata requirements at the MFP that users would see at their desktop. So, if you have trained your users to save electronic documents to a repository, the same process will apply at the MFP.

In terms of controlling user/site license costs, scanning at shared scanning devices like MFPs is typically not charged on a per user basis. When working with a backend application, a users SharePoint CAL is valid at either the user’s desktop and the scanning device, so no additional CAL should be necessary.

A follow-up question to this was also posed:

So, while reducing a centralized scan/capture environment, would we still need a centralized index/quality control-type environment?

Distributed scanning processes are not necessarily designed as a replacement to centralized scanning operations. So, it is very likely that both will be maintained. As far as indexing/QC operations, in an application like eCopy’s those functions are done by the user at the point of capture (preview, indexing, metadata, etc.). However, a distributed capture application can also augment a  centralized capture process, pushing the indexing/QC functions further out to the workforce.

We’ll have more questions on the blog later this week. In the meantime, please feel free to post any questions that you may have about Document Imaging in the comment field below.

Bill DeStefanis

Director of Product Management

eCopy Open Document Services

In the April 7 issue of the Document Imaging Report, Editor Ralph Gammon has an informative interview with I.R.I.S. CEO Pierre De Muelenaere. You CAN'T read the article unless you are a subscriber, but you can click on Document Imaging Report to learn more about Gammon's publication.

The article is interesting because it discusses how I.R.I.S. is one of the first to take advantage of eCopy opening its document services layer to corporate developers, ISVs and SIs. According to Gammon, "instead of having to release documents to apply processes such as OCR, in the new services-based paradigm, a third-party OCR could be run within [eCopy] ShareScan. This would produce a full-text searchable document that could then be released through a Connector into a third-party app."

OCR is just one, easy-to-understand example of document services that could be embedded within ShareScan. Just about any document imaging service could be incorported.

The press release describing the new I.R.I.S. document services partnership can be read at I.R.I.S and eCopy Partner. I.R.I.S has created a great page on the Document Imaging Wiki. See I.R.I.S. to learn more about the company. Other ISVs that should consider writing document services modules for eCopy ShareScan include A2IA, Adlib, Atalasoft, Cvision and Accusoft. There are many, many more.

Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Orgs – Webinar on April 9

This Wednesday we are co-presenting an AIIM-hosted webinar with Forrester Research analyst Craig Le Clair on the topic of Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Environments.  To register for the free Webinar, click here.

The webinar is designed to help companies that have invested in Microsoft software understand how to best integrate paper-based documents into the electronic workflows that are powered by applications such as Microsoft Office, SharePoint, SQL Databases and beyond. Craig will also talk about how companies can leverage both Microsoft technologies and 3rd party applications that tightly integrate with Microsoft to help bridge the information gap between back office operations and the front office, leading to the goal of a highly productive Information Workplace.

Join us on Wednesday at 2:00 EST for this Webinar, followed by an open Q&A with Craig and Bill DeStefanis of eCopy.

Making Scanning & Sharing Documents Easier with SharePoint

Microsoft posted a SharePoint customer case study article today on the Microsoft Momentum site. The article features eCopy document imaging software customer Introgen Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company that used SharePoint and eCopy to meet government regulations. The author, Alan Earls, discusses how eCopy duplicates the Microsoft SharePoint user experience at the MFP. To read the article click on Microsoft SharePont document imaging.

EMC & eCopy Webinar on Distributed Capture

On Tuesday, March 18, EMC and eCopy will be co-presenting a Webinar on Distributed Capture. A distributed capture approach is a highly effective way for organizations with multiple locations – across a campus or the world – to quickly and securely share information between remote locations and a central processing site.  This is particularly true for transactional, paper-based content that may need to be processed through advanced document processing software -- such as EMC Captiva – but arrives in a location separate from the central processing site.

Tune into this Webinar on Tuesday to learn how to:

• Leverage the office equipment that you currently use – like MFPs/copiers and scanners – to capture incoming paper documents from multiple locations
• Add intelligence to remote scanning operations – from content capture to classification, extraction, validation and delivery
• Control access to sensitive paper documents by eliminating the need to ship outside the office
• Reduce document processing time from days to seconds

To register, click here.

eCopy Launches The Document Imaging Wiki

The Document Imaging industry encompasses a lot of technology, companies, experts and products – from scanners to MFPs, desktop applications to enterprise-wide software and everything in between. When conducting research about document imaging, information is not always easily accessible or consolidated in one place.

To help solve this problem, eCopy has created and launched the Document Imaging Wiki as a centralized source of information open to anyone who is researching document imaging technologies and trying to learn what would best benefit their work environment. It’s basically a Wikipedia for the Document Imaging industry, including information on industry terms, companies, industry experts and analysts, and sources to find additional information on document imaging.

The Document Imaging Wiki is a public Website and is designed to be updated at any time by individuals with knowledge of the document imaging industry. In addition, people are encouraged to contribute questions to be addressed by the document imaging community in the discussion forums.

For more information on the wiki, you can read the press release. We look forward to seeing your contributions to the site and helping it grow as a resource for the industry.

AIIM Expo - Presentation for Developers

If you are heading to the AIIM Expo next week and are a software developer, systems integrator or corporate developer interested in learning how to add document imaging and capture capabilities to a software application, head to the Application Showcase Theater on the show floor at 11:30 on Tuesday, March 4th. Chip Whitman, director of software alliances for eCopy, will be presenting "Eight Critical Considerations When Extending Your Software to Include Document Imaging." 

Software applications are only as valuable as the information contained within them, and integrating document imaging capabilities to those applications can increase their value by providing an easy way for any office worker to scan paper documents and include information contained in those documents into software applications.

The session will outline the critical factors that need to be considered in a document imaging platform so that the resulting application is not only easy to use and administer but also securely connects to existing business workflows. The session will also highlight the go-to-market considerations for developers as they bring these scanning applications to customers, including:

• How to select the right MFP and scanner platforms for document capture.
• The essential tools a document imaging software development kit must deliver.
• A look at integration issues when connecting document scanning with business software applications.
• Best approaches for building customized solutions to address specific application issues.
• The “must have” document services that should be included in any development platform.

We hope that you can stop by on Tuesday to hear this presentation. And don't forget to look for eCopy in the many booths that the product will be demonstrated in next week!

eCopy Expands Document Imaging Offerings

Last week, I posted about how corporate and third-party developers should consider writing integrations between MFPs and software applications using an open platform document imaging solution, like eCopy ShareScan. I noted that using an open platform solution to integrate MFPs and business application has significant advantages over proprietary document imaging solutions by allowing companies to easily support their current business environment and needs, as well as changes to that environment and business demands moving forward.

On Wednesday, we made a number of announcements around our product portfolio that expand this message.  The first is a repackaging of our ShareScan and eCopy Desktop product lines, expanding our offering to a wider range of document imaging solutions that meet any requirement – from supporting basic personal productivity needs to powering company-wide business process efficiency initiatives.

The second announcement is the availability of eCopy ShareScan for Xerox MFPs. This expands the availability of eCopy to work with the seven leading MFP brands in the world. With the expanded availability of eCopy products for leading MFP and scanner brands, companies are able to standardize their document imaging process and offer their employees a single, easy-to-use way to integrate paper into their electronic business processes – regardless of the type of scanning device that they are using.

The third announcement is that under an OEM relationship, Canon will embed eCopy ShareScan Essentials software on the Canon ScanFront, a compact, standalone network scanner offering. The availability of ShareScan on network scanners like the Canon ScanFront – a rapidly expanding class of document scanners – as well as any ISIS scanner, gives businesses the option to standardize their document imaging process across whatever scanning device is most appropriate for their business environment.

The final announcement last week is that we have opened up the Document Services layer of ShareScan, allowing developers to integrate document services offerings into ShareScan. Document Services improve the handling, appearance, categorization and management of scanned documents through image services (de-speckle, de-skew, page removal, page separation, etc.) and data publishing (barcode processing, zonal optical character recognition (OCR), forms recognition, automated data extraction, etc.) applications. The availability of these new services helps companies offer advanced document imaging to any office worker.

We’re excited about all of these new offerings and the opportunities that they bring to organizations looking to standardize their document imaging technology. If you have comments or questions, please post a comment below.

Leveraging MFP Investments – Part 1: Development Platforms

Let’s assume that your company’s employees are scanning documents using your MFPs. They appreciate the accessibility and familiarity of using this familiar office device to not only print and copy, but also convert their paper documents into electronic files that they can work with like the rest of their information. There is a good chance, however, that most of the time they are scanning paper documents and either sending them to themselves via e-mail or saving them to a network file location where they then retrieve them.

While this is a good first step, it still leaves a multiple-step process for adding paper into the business applications that run your business – scan, send, search, retrieve and then add to business applications. And, it does not leverage the capabilities made possible by today’s MFPs and document imaging software through their development platforms.

These development platforms make it possible to build integrations between the MFP and business applications so that users can directly access and scan to those applications while at the MFP – saving extra time, steps and increasing document security.  There are two ways to leverage these development platforms, either as a corporate developer, independent software vendor or systems integrator:

• Write the integration directly to the manufacturers’ platform using their SDK
• Write the integration to a document imaging platform that offers support for multiple manufacturers’ platforms, such as eCopy ShareScan

A number of factors can play into which option to go with, but here are three of the biggest reasons to use an open platform environment, like eCopy’s:
1) If your company is using more than one brand of MFP, or if you upgrade devices in stages vs. the entire fleet at a time, you will have to build and update the integrations for each brand and, likely, each time you get a new MFP
2) Multiple integrations require the use of multiple SDKs. You should choose an SDK that uses an industry-standard environment - like MS Visual Studio, and has features that make it easy to use such as a UI forms designer and wizards.
3) The development platform should support the features that you need for your scanning process, including document services such as barcode recognition and image enhancement; identity services; OCR; and cost recovery services.

Integrations between MFPs and business applications are a key component to leveraging investments in both your MFP and the business applications that run your business. Using open platform document imaging software like eCopy ShareScan, these integrations can be easily built to support your current business environment, as well as changes to that environment and business needs moving forward.

AIIM Expo – Connecting Hardware and Software

The annual AIIM Expo is coming up in Boston on March 3-6. Since combining with the Print On Demand show a few years back, the AIIM Expo has really become the premier opportunity to see both the hardware and software vendors that work within the content and information management industry.  On the hardware end, all the major MFP and scanner manufacturers are usually in attendance. And from the software side, everyone from the largest ECM vendors to specialized ISVs is represented.

For those considering document imaging solutions, it’s the perfect show. At the hardware booths, you can talk about what software applications they can connect to as part of a document management or content management solution.  And at the software booths, you can talk about what your options are for ensuring that paper is easily and securely included in those systems. Too many times, organizations look at their hardware purchases and software purchases in silos, not thinking about how they can and should be integrated.

So if you are heading to the AIIM Expo in March and are walking the floor, think about your document workflows and whether there is a way to integrate your organization’s hardware and software systems. And if you are in one of the following booths, be sure to ask them to demonstrate eCopy ShareScan to you.

Hardware Vendors: Canon (#1416); Konica Minolta (#913,916); HP (#1817); Ricoh (#631)

Software Vendors: Artsyl Technologies (#2773); ADOS (Microsoft Pavilion/MP16); ABBYY (#2451); Biscom (#2472); EMC (#2231); I.R.I.S. (#2817); K2 (Microsoft Pavilion /MP16); Questys (#2655); Rochester Software Associates (#625); Sagem-Interstar (#2967); Softlinx (#2364); Equitrac (#947); Laserfiche (#2525); Hyland (#2731); and Westbrook/Fortis (#2243).

School Pays for Student Laptops via the Paperless Office

The UK national newspaper The Guardian posted an article today in its education section about a high school that helped pay for its students' laptops by implementing a paperless office strategy through MFP document imaging. The savings came from eliminating the cost of distributing paper documents. The article can be read by clicking here. You know that when a national, daily newspaper starts writing about MFP document imaging, the topic is beginning to be popular.

Platforms power the future of the MFP (Part 3)

In earlier posts, I covered how MFPs are becoming more input-centric and how platforms and APIs are tying together the MFP with backend office and enterprise applications. But there is a roadblock that must be overcome in order to make this all work seamlessly in the real world.

The roadblock: MFP platforms are not all the same. Each of the platforms that I mentioned in Part 1 have different APIs. So, for a developer of a software application to integrate with more than one MFP brand it would need to use a separate SDK to write code for every brand. This gets even more complex because changes occur most times a new MFP is released, requiring new QA testing on every device – even if the platform hasn’t changed.

To give an example of this complexity, there are nine major MFP brands and each release 3-4 new “families” of products per year. So at a minimum, you are dealing with about 30 new devices to write to and test each year. Ensuring that the connectivity between the MFP and software application runs effectively is an enormous undertaking and one that most software developers do not have the resources to support. This is a major barrier and has restricted direct connectivity between MFPs and hardware. There are only a handful of software companies that write integrations directly to MFPs.

But there is a solution. A document imaging platform can be used to act as the connection between the MFP and software applications. The document imaging platform provider is the only one that needs to keep up with the ever-changing MFP manufacturers, updating its software to ensure that it works on all MFP brands. With this work completed, any software vendor can then just write integration to the platform and work with all of the MFPs that the document imaging platform supports. This “write-once, work with many” approach gives the software vendors the opportunity to let any end user on any MFP leverage the new input capabilities that I have discussed earlier. 

This three part combination will deliver new opportunities to utilize MFPs in a more strategic way to power business process efficiency:
1) Hardware manufacturers making devices more “input-friendly”
2) The maturation and expansion of document imaging platforms to run on any MFP
3) Software vendors writing integration to the document imaging platforms

4th Annual eCopy Paper Connection Forum

I generally try to avoid talking about eCopy specific information in this blog, but wanted to put in a quick plug for our annual conference, the eCopy Paper Connection Forum. It’s a unique event in the industry, as we gather hundreds of representatives from office equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors and office equipment resellers all in the same location to network, learn about document imaging, and help each other succeed. And this year, for the first time, we’re inviting end users to participate in the event and get a chance to meet with all of the different companies that make up the office document ecosystem and learn how they can improve their document workflows.

So, mark your calendars for October 6-9, 2008 for the event in Boston. And please tell us what is important for you to hear at the event -- we’re working on the agenda now and we welcome your input!